Our HBGary/Anonymous e-book now available on Amazon

When we launched our first e-book, Unmasked, it was available only to Premier Subscribers. The book collects our lengthy series of feature articles on the hacker collective Anonymous, how it broke into the servers of security company HBGary Federal, and the bizarre fallout from revealing the company's e-mails. Some readers asked for a way to purchase the e-book on its own, and we listened.

We've spent the last few weeks navigating the world of digital publishing and are happy to announce that Unmasked is now available for purchase. Regardless of where you buy the e-book, it should cost approximately $1.99, and many of the stores have free samples that include about 15 percent of the content.

Remember, you can still get the e-book in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats by becoming a Premier Subscriber and downloading it via the announcement page. In addition to Unmasked and all future books, Premier Subscribers also get PDFs of feature articles, our Quarterly Report series, an ad-free experience on Ars, and full-text RSS feeds—all for $5 per month or $50 per year.

But if you're not ready to subscribe and you still want to get in on the Unmasked e-book goodness, we've got options:

As of today, you can buy Unmasked from your Kindle or via the above link and have it sent directly to your device over WhisperNet. We’ve asked that Amazon not apply DRM to the book, and we also allow lending and have enabled text-to-speech. Amazon takes a significantly larger chunk of the sale price than other outlets, but in exchange you get convenient wireless delivery of the book, and we get a lot more exposure.

Smashwords lets you buy the e-book in whatever format you prefer (MOBI, EPUB, PDF, HTML, text, or RTF) via the Web with no DRM. Smashwords takes a pretty small cut of the sale price, and offers a myriad of formats and does a lot of the work to get the book into a ton of non-Amazon stores.

Other places, now

Courtesy of being in the Smashwords catalog, the book is also automatically available within Stanza—search for “Ars Technica” in the Stanza Smashwords catalog—and in the Aldiko, Word-Player, and FBReader in-app catalogs. It has also been submitted for inclusion in the Inkmesh e-book search engine. Some of these may not immediately show the book in their indexes, but it should be filtering in soon.

Everywhere else…soon!

Smashwords is also taking care of automatically distributing the book to the other major e-book stores. These include the Apple iBooks store, Sony Reader Store, the Barnes & Noble NOOKbook Store, the Kobo store, Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson Australia (both powered by Kobo), Whitcoulls (New Zealand, powered by Kobo), and the Diesel e-book store. We’ll keep everyone updated as to when the book arrives in the various catalogs (it could take up to two weeks from the publication of this article).

We have definitely learned a lot from this experience, and it's going to make future endeavors of this nature easier (and even more awesome). Thanks to everyone who gave us great ideas and feedback.

For those interested in this topic, I'd like to recommend Julian Assange's Underground which documents the exploits of the Australian hacker/cracker/phracker scene back in the 80's / 90's. A very compelling read.www.xs4all.nl/~suelette/underground

I realized I had an Amazon Prime addiction when I heard myself complaining to my wife that I actually had to leave the house to get a haircut, and that I would much prefer it if there were a way to get one from Amazon.

Yes, on any kindle actually. You could do the same with the mobi from us. You just plug your Kindle into a PC or Mac via its USB cable and drop the .mobi file into the Documents folder on the Kindle's drive.

I realized I had an Amazon Prime addiction when I heard myself complaining to my wife that I actually had to leave the house to get a haircut, and that I would much prefer it if there were a way to get one from Amazon.

Tried a mechanical turk request for a haircut? ($0.01 per hair shortened or something). Granted, you're likely to have 5000 people with scissors on your doorstep.

Great work on the book, btw. Can't see it on the Canadian Amazon yet but I'm sure it's not far off

Why would anyone want to buy this crap is beyond me. Except perhaps for anyone interested in financially supporting Ars. But there's other ways that don't involve coming home with the technological equivalent of a celebrities magazine covering the newest scandal. Neither both parties in that scandal deserve this type of attention. Whatever.

I realized I had an Amazon Prime addiction when I heard myself complaining to my wife that I actually had to leave the house to get a haircut, and that I would much prefer it if there were a way to get one from Amazon.

I'm recommending this to a friend who just bought an iPad. What's the easiest place to get an iPad friendly version? Hopefully without needing a 3rd party app. I suspect they won't buy if it requires an app just for this.

I'm recommending this to a friend who just bought an iPad. What's the easiest place to get an iPad friendly version? Hopefully without needing a 3rd party app. I suspect they won't buy if it requires an app just for this.

Well according to the article Smashwords offers a PDF, which I'm quite sure should work just fine on an iPad.

Yes, on any kindle actually. You could do the same with the mobi from us. You just plug your Kindle into a PC or Mac via its USB cable and drop the .mobi file into the Documents folder on the Kindle's drive.

If your lazy (like me) you can even email the .mobi to username@free.kindle.com and next time you connect to a wireless network the kindle will download the file and with no charge.

It's ironic that you're selling this book on Amazon, after previously publishing articles indicating that the FBI is being granted broad access to personal sales/ book purchase histories by Amazon. The privacy/ "law enforcement" aspect of that has some interesting implications, especially in the context of this case.

On the subject of covers, loved that "Spy Who Knew Too Little" spoof graphic, that would've been great! (A little wordy though, and difficult to tie in with the "Unmasked" title) *shrugs* Still my favorite of the saga.